Happy New Year!

Happy New Year! All of us at Cool 94.3 and KIKV-FM wish you all the best in 2019 and thank you for being the most important part of our stations.

To say 2018 was eventful here at Cool 94.3 and KIKV-FM would be an understatement. To fully explain what kind of year 2018 was, I need to take you back to December 27, 2017. That was the day that would impact our entire 2018, and we didn’t talk about it very much publically.

The Flood

I was on the air on Cool 94.3 during the afternoon, when all of a sudden I heard a huge bang over my head. Jill Kelly, the afternoon announcer on KIKV, heard it too, and we both ran into the hallway outside of our respective studios to see if either one of us knew what was going on. We didn’t. It was quite a loud bang. So, I quickly went outside to see if something had happened to our roof, when all of a sudden, Jill was yelling at me to get back inside – NOW!!!

Water. Dumping, torrential, water. Everywhere in the Cool 94.3 studio. It was like somebody had turned on a giant faucet over my head. Water was coming in from the ceiling – cold and fast. I knew I needed to do something, but I just stood there stunned (probably for ten seconds but it felt like four hours) until our Traffic Director, Kristi, yelled at me to “SAVE THE HARD DRIVE!!!”. Oh yeah! That sort of shocked me back into action. So, I started yanking cords and pulling out the hard drive (it was still dry! Yay!) and shutting things off and being really thankful that I had worn rubber boots that day.

Someone told me that we only had water coming down for about ten minutes or so. In those ten minutes, the water managed to destroy the Cool 94.3 studio and do significant damage to the back part of our whole building.

It was sad.

After The Water Stopped

We were cold, wet, and shocked that this had just happened. But in those moments, when water was pouring in, it was really heartening to see our staff pull together to save what we could, and make sure we mitigated as much damage as possible.

After the water was shut off, Paul Sorum (you know him as one of the Morning guys on KIKV, but he’s also the Program Director at KIKV) grabbed that hard drive that I had pulled before it got drowned and 45 minutes after Cool was knocked off the air – he had us back the air from a production studio. It wasn’t perfect, but we were ON THE AIR.

So, that’s pretty much how we started 2018. Wet, but ON THE AIR!!

Here’s some photos of what the water did:

Cool Studio - post flood

The Recovery – Into 2018

That afternoon, we had a crew of recovery specialists who brought us industrial dryers. Over the next few days, carpet was ripped out, insulation and soundproofing was removed, drywall taken out… it was a process, and before we could be whole again, we had to go back down to the studs.

2018 became a year of renewal and improvement at KIKV and Cool 94.3.

New things started showing up.

We got new carpeting though the whole building! Updated colors! New paint! We even switched some office space around and ended up with a whole new conference room, so now if there’s a meeting, it doesn’t need to take place in our lunchroom and it doesn’t hold the coffee machine hostage from everyone else. So that’s a VAST improvement.

Bigger things started happening – new equipment! New software! The Cool 94. 3 studios got a brand new audio mixing board! Both stations got upgraded software from which they now run their programming – Zetta is the state of the art broadcast software, and it allows us to do things on-air that we had only previously dreamt about. There was a bit of a learning curve for all of us, but we’ve figured it out without too many tears. In addition, we’ve installed a production management software, vCreative, which improves communication between departments in the whole process of creating and airing commercials. These changes improve the sound of our stations for our listeners, and streamline the commercial process for our sales and production teams so that we can provide an even better product to our clients.

Cool Studio, new audio mixing board, new Zetta software.

Restored walls, new carpeting, updated color choices.

The Future – Heading into 2019

With all of these changes, we have come to the end of 2018 and into 2019 stronger than ever, with a even bigger commitment to this area, our clients, our listeners, and the future. We know that we have the adaptability to compete in an ever changing media culture and we look forward to the challenges ahead.